Patrick S. Adams: The Political Assassination of Sarah Palin

It’s a fill in the blanks template
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Our Blogs 4 Palin colleague Patrick S. Adams makes many good points in his latest post:

Think about this. More manufactured outrage was directed at Sarah Palin and the American Right than at the shooter. When people are genuinely outraged and shocked, they react in many different ways. There is no blueprint for how we handle tragedy. People who don’t know each other don’t go on Twitter and all tweet the same things. However, when outrage is manufactured for political purpose, the boilerplate that has been evident so many times before becomes stunningly obvious.

It’s clear from the fluid effort on the part of the media that their talking points and the timing of their responses to Sarah Palin are flowing in a pre-ordained time frame. The tragedy happens and trained bloggers and tweeters hit the internet within 30 minutes.

Play it out further. Once the Twitter sphere and blogosphere is saturated with the vitriol, the next step is for the liberal media to pick up the meme and begin discussing the role of Palin’s rhetoric in the shooting. Then, they pull out the file they have been waiting to use since prior to the 2010 elections which include a picture of the Take Back the 20 map complete with crosshairs and a clip of speech where Sarah Palin uses the words “don’t retreat, reload.” Had Sarah Palin left a candy bar wrapper on the ground outside of a CVS three months ago, they would have pulled that out, too.

Follow this up with complaints of Palin remaining silent on the issue to set up the next talking point that she is interjecting herself into the story. Print it up and have it ready to go. Leave the time and date blank. You know she’s going on Facebook. It’s just a matter of when and then bang, hit send and the preordained media narrative now becomes what they planned it to be the day before. Rush Limbaugh pointed out that the media made Palin part of the story on purpose.

Which brings us to today’s move, which comes complete with coordinated talking points like “her political career is finished” and this is “the nail in her political coffin.” This tells me that if you had gotten the talking points memo this past Saturday, those points were already scheduled for today in advance. Whether she said “blood libel” or not is irrelevant as they would have gone with something else. Attacking Sarah Palin is simple for those who make it up as they go. It’s a fill in the blanks template.

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We are witnessing a political assassination in which the killer in full view of witnesses and television cameras executes the victim and the media reports it as a suicide.

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Follow the link, and read Patrick's full post.

- JP